What is exactly API and why we call it like that? I am learning web development, and always come across APIs. I would love to learn it through an analogy.
In: Engineering
Application Programming Interface. A fancy word that describes when one program needs to call another. This happens quite often, and to program you call library features a lot, those are also APIs. So it’s a very natural and common thing that programmers do.
For web code, you have to get the data to display from somewhere. There’s a ton of different ways to implement this and it’s way beyond ELI5 to cover them all. Regardless, if a web-interface shows you the current weather, you use an API to retrieve the weather data and then convert that into a display that your user want (css, javascript etc). This can be a lot more complicated than just weather, but it’s the same principle every time. You need to interact with another program to get/pass data that you then present to your user in a form that make sense to them.
Latest Answers